The English Iliad

...When Sir Balin is told that the sword he has acquired will cause the deaths of his brother and himself, he says only "I shall take the adventure that God will ordain me," and keeps the sword...

...For example, Sir Gawaine is chivalric and heroic in some tales, and a jealous, treacherous and inadequate knight in the Tristram section...

...or Achilles reproving Lycaon before killing him...

...He lacks Achilles' range of feeling, his flawed and complex personality, his tragic purchase of glory at the cost of early death...

...One of its units, "The Tale of King Arthur and the Emperor Lucius," is a preposterous saga in which Arthur's Knights defeat the Roman army of 60,000 and get Arthur anointed Emperor of Rome...

...King Arthur, running to his death at the hands of his traitorous son Sir Mordred, cries: "Tide me death, betide me life...

...Finally, so many of the characters are conventional...

...It is about time that someone protested Graves' misuse of his great imaginative gifts in muddying every scholarly water he touches...

...The book consists of eight separate tales, with little beyond the concept of the Round Table to integrate them, and great inconsistencies among them...

...Le Morte Darthur is not quite the English Iliad...

...When Sir Gaheris catches his mother Queen Margawse in bed with Sir Lamorak, he cuts off her head with his sword, so that her hot blood spurts all over Sir Lamorak, hot blood "the which he loved passing well" in another fashion...

...Wherever Malory is now, I hope that he is pleased at the survival and success of his fantasy life...

...Given characters that are really no more than ritual roles, Malory manages to produce a considerable complexity in them...

...when a knight charges him with it, he challenges the knight to prove it at combat...

...Sir Launcelot, on an adventure, rides "overthwart and endlong in a wild forest...

...Malory compiled romances, but he did not try to integrate them into an epic...

...Dame Liones calls Gareth "cockroach" in Baines (it is "kitchen knave" in Malory...

...It is quite as savage, for example...

...Malory's calls him only "glutton...

...The women are similarly flat, with two exceptions...

...The quest for the Grail does not unify Le Morte Darthur as the war against Troy unifies the Iliad, and in fact by the end of the book the Grail has been forgotten...

...Elaine the Maid of Astolat, dying for love of Launcelot and having her corpse floated down the Thames to him on a barge, is stale caramel in Tennyson, but in Malory the episode is fresh, touching and beautiful...

...he is frantic with jealousy toward superior knights...

...The other is Le Morte d'Arthur (Clarkson ?. Potter, 512 pp., $6.00), a paraphrase in modern idiom, condensed to less than half, by Keith Baines, with decorations by Enrico Arno...

...Certainly we will teach him a much-needed lesson," says Baines' Sir Launcelot, like a scoutmaster ("I shall be your rescue and learn him to be ruled as a knight," says Malory's...

...True, Launcelot does not get to choose glory and a short life, but we know that he would if given the choice...

...Two knights, first Sir Pellinore and then Sir Palamides, pursue the Questing Beast, and King Arthur and Sir Tristram at different times see the Beast and hear its stomach rumble "like unto the questing of thirty couple hounds," but the Beast is never explained...

...His introduction also tells the innocent reader that the historical existence of Arthur, as a Roman general named Arturius, has been "proved beyond reasonable doubt," and that "Arthur had long been converted into a counter-Christ, with twelve knights of the Round Table to suggest the Twelve Apostles, and with a Second Coming...

...Palamides turns out to be not a hysteric but a lovesick Byronic hero somewhat in advance of his time, even to composing ballads about his hopeless love...

...It seems hardly worth saying that there were 150 knights of the Round Table...

...And so on...

...When one compares Malory, not with Homer, but with what Tennyson or T. H. White made of King Arthur and the Round Table, one comes to appreciate Le Morte Danhur more...

...In some respects Le Morte Darthur is childish...

...There are stretches where only the adulteries reassure the reader that he has not strayed into a Junior Classic...

...King Mark, for example, is a tormented, ambivalent and complex human being in Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan and holt...

...If it is not the English Iliad, it comes closer to it than any other work in the language...

...Malory was himself no very perfect gentle knight, but a brawler, rapist and cattle thief who wrote the book in Newgate Prison in 1470...

...Queen Guenever is a real woman: terrified of pain, passionate, cynical and hot-tempered...

...One reissue is Le Morte Darthiir (University Books, 432 and 530 pp., $15.00), two volumes in one, with modern spelling by A. W. Pollard and a glossary...

...The other is an unnamed gentlewoman (Artemis...

...The Baines rendition is thus an unmitigated disaster, comparable to making Howard Pyle out of the Robin Hood ballads...

...We snicker at White's portrayal of the Round Table knights as a group of chaps good at games, but no one snickers, reading Malory, when the traitor Sir Meliagraunce reveals the adultery between Sir Launcelot and Queen Guenever by throwing back her bed curtains and showing the sheets and pillows all "bebled" with Launcelot's blood...

...Finally there is Sir Dinadan, whose cynical realism about the likelihood of pain and defeat in fighting comes out of the real world in which Malory lived, and is never understood by the others...

...as for the happy victor, "all was blood and brains on his sword...

...As for the Second Coming, Malory, who (unlike Graves) could tell his own fantasies from reality, observed that many believe that King Arthur will return, "but for myself I do not believe this...

...The appearance of two new editions of Sir Thomas Malory's book suggests an increasing popularity...

...When a lady charges him with it, he answers unhappily: "I may not warn people to speak of me what it plcaseth them...

...What flourisheth and burgeoneth, of course, is Sir Modred's treachery, King Arthur's death, and the dissolution of the Round Table...

...Like Diomedes or the enraged Achilles, these heroes fight like ghouls: in battle their horses are "in blood up to the fetlocks...

...If that is what your conscience dictates, you must go," says Tristram's father in Baines ("I will well," he says in Malory, "that ye be ruled as your courage will rule you...

...The Arthurian knights tend to fight first and talk afterwards, and their talk is almost always conventional address...

...Sir Breuse Saunce Pité, "the falsest knight of the world now living," appears periodically to kill a defenseless damosel or trample a fallen knight, but no one ever catches him, and halfway through the book he quietly disappears...

...King Arthur achieved his true imortality in Le Morte Darthur, and so, for that matter, did bad Sir Thomas Malory...

...Baines' Arthur calls a cannibal giant "You murderous freak...

...The tragic final events, like the Robin Hood contests, occur in May, when, as Malory reminds us, "every lusty heart flourisheth and burgeoneth, for as the season is lusty to behold and comfortable, so man and woman rejoice and gladden of summer coming with his fresh flowers...

...Once all that is said—and it must be said—we arrive at the wonders and delights of Le Morte Darthur...

...Sir Gawaine becomes most human near the end of the book, when he lies on the ground wounded and conquered by Launcelot, and tries to provoke Launcelot into killing him...

...Perhaps the finest touch of all is one that Malory inherits from the ancient rites underlying his myths...

...When two knights fight, "either smote other so that horse and man went to the earth, and so they lay long astonied, and their horses' knees brast to the hard bone...

...and when he is bested in a tourney he weeps and wails all night...

...who shoots an arrow at a deer and manages to hit Sir Launcelot "in the thick of the buttock...

...The Iliad has a marvelous eloquence that Malory's book lacks...

...The chief of them, Launcelot, is much inferior to Achilles as a character...

...Sir Palamides, the Saracen knight, is a contradictory figure...

...The great glory of Le Morte Darthur is its language...

...E. K. Chambers, in a pamphlet on Malory, quotes an unnamed poet's characterization of the book as "the dim Arthuriad," and that comes closer to accuracy...

...WRITERS & WRITING The English Iliad By Stanley Edgar Hyman IN OUR day of courtly and chivalric warfare, the adventures of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table have a particular relevance...

...Launcelot's mortal sin keeps him from success in the Grail quest, but after Arthur's death he forsakes the world and dies repentant, a pilgrim and a hermit, and his bishop has a vision in which a great band of angels heave Sir Launcelot into heaven —that "heave" gives a wonderful sense of the knightly muscles under the hermit's gown...

...In his sin he hears a voice curse him as "more harder than is the stone, and more bitter than is the wood, and more naked and barer than is the leaf of the fig tree...

...As a true knight, Sir Launcelot may not lie, but he may not acknowledge his affair with the Queen either...

...when he protests, she airily dismisses the incident...

...A wicked king has "purfled" (embroidered) a mantle with the beards of kings he has overcome...

...Here is the genesis of a royal bastard: "The king had ado with her, and gat on her a child...

...There are all sorts of loose ends...

...when he demands Arthur's beard, Arthur answers: "Thou mayest see my beard is full young yet to make a purfle of it...

...Perhaps it is best to get all of Le Morte Darthur's failings out of the way at once...

...He is brave and courteous but he fights unethically...

...The other male figures are conventional, including King Arthur...

...Robert Graves contributes a characteristic introduction praising Baines' travesty as a "workmanlike task" that improves the book by "removing all of the idle rhetoric...

...in Malory he is a cardboard villain: faithless, treacherous, cowardly and weak...

...How sad that I broke my magic sword!," says Baines' King Arthur ("I have no sword," says Malory's...

...Le Morte Darthur does resemble the Iliad in some respects...

...Examples are Sarpedon's speech, as he goes into battle, acknowledging human mortality...